They say you should always be suspicious of someone who places a watch in front of him as he starts speaking.
This may be true. This was a dark moment in the annals of a Southeastern Michigan regional meeting scholarly conference.
I had been handed the chairmanship of one of the sub-groups, and I thought it would be interesting to combine some scholarly presentations with some creative-writer presentations. That in itself was not a mistake and would have turned out well—there were well-known creative writers from several Michigan colleges.
The mistake was in my choice of the scholar. A U. of M English Department professor, the year before, had given an excellent, concise, well-focused paper that was very well received. He applied again this year. The difference was that he offered only a proposed topic, not a finished paper. On the strength of his presentation the year before, and the possibilities of the topic, I accepted the proposal.
This time, however, the paper itself was never completed. When the professor sat down at the table in front of the room to give his 15-20 minute presentation, setting his wristwatch carefully in front of him, we could not know that he would launch a nearly 1 1/2 hour rambling, diffuse blather, which he was obviously making up as he went along, and which, to a large extent, consisted of a plot summary of The Tempest. The other participants were champing at the bit, and I—green as I was—didn’t have the nerve to simply interrupt him, or signal him that he had five minutes left. He was rude to his colleagues, and my mistake was a) to have accepted a proposal rather than a finished paper; and b) not to cut him off, even midsentence, so the other presenters could have their shot.
2. A similar thing happened at another academic conference, this time at a Society for Photographic Education meeting in Dallas, Texas. Again, I was the moderator. I believe the topic was language and photography, which was hot at the time. The section was to consist of two speakers, one from Cranbrook Art Academy, the other from the University of Washington; he was a well-known scholar/critic on theoretical issues in visual interpretation. The first, from Cranbrook, was to be a discussion based on visuals. The second, a more theoretical approach.
I had asked both of them to cover those areas, thinking that the combination would be very effective.
And it would have been. I should have seen danger ahead, however, when I noticed the Cranbrook speaker loading more than 100 slides into a tray. There is no way anyone can get 100 slides into a 15-20 minute presentation.
But that’s what he seemed determined to do. The Cranbrook speaker launched into a presentation that, in spite of repeated cut-off signals, took at least an hour and effectively crowded out the other speaker, who was left with time only for a brief summary of his point(s), which he did concisely, and the distribution of a well-selected bibliography related to the issue at hand.
Lessons: never accept a proposal when a completed paper is the basis of acceptance. Once the proposal is accepted, the speaker has no incentive to complete it. This U of M professor may also have felt that there was so little at stake in this regional conference that he needn’t worry about his presentation. Even if it stunk, which it did, it would appear on his bio as a “Paper Presented,” and he would get tenure/promotion credit. Crass opportunism.
The other lesson, related to both speakers, is: as a moderator, don’t hesitate to enforce the 20-minute rule. You have the authority, and the other presenters are looking to you. Get the hook, if you have to, and forcibly drag rude, inconsiderate colleagues offstage. You are entitled to punch them if necessary.
I suppose there will be other such manifestations of blind ego as these speakers, and the whole affair is history, but neither event blessed me with a sense of joy in the scholarly community, and both events still anger me on the very few occasions when I remember them. Maybe this blog will be cathartic.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Got'em by the Short Hairs
“Ha! Got’em by the short Hairs”
A boast by the CFO of Center for Creative Studies—I didn’t hear this directly. It was reported to me. But I could imagine him saying it, with his fist clenched, and a sense that he was saving the institution from financial collapse and disappearance into the abyss. His initials were J.C. (I’ll withhold his full name.) Interestingly, “J.C.” are also the initials of another not-so-very-unknown messianic figure.
CFO overstates his title—he was the school’s accountant. He handled all the financial transactions, and in that capacity he considered it his personal mission to be as tight-fisted as possible. “Scrooge” was a compliment. When I first arrived at CCS, in 1976, shortly after it had converted from a two-year certificate-granting institution to a bona-fide four-year degree-granting institution, he held sway. Outside the exercise of his professional responsibilities, he was a genuinely congenial and easy-going guy, but in his office, watch out! He had the cop’s “command and control” demeanour, and a bulldog’s stocky, solid build. He always wore a white or off-white dress shirt, no tie, sleeves rolled up to reveal muscular forearms—he might have anchored a bowling team in his off-hours. His wife, whom I met once, was unfailingly sweet and good-natured.
If I ran out of chalk in a classroom, I had to make a trip to his office (a building away) for more. On my first visit, I expected that he would give me at least a box of chalk—if not several—to keep in the department offices. This appeal must have happened before, though. He was prepared. He rummaged in his desk for a moment and produced two clean white sticks, admonishing me to use them sparingly. When I suggested that it was ridiculous for me to walk over to his office just for two sticks of chalk, I got the command and control glare.
The academic department had no typewriter. The secretarial staff in the main office had, I believe, just started converting from manuals to IBM Selectrics. I asked about getting a typewriter for our department and, several days later, was given a Smith-Corona portable electric typewriter purchased at K-Mart. We used that for several years. We may have gotten a second one later. It took a couple of years of typing out letters and memos on what was essentially a student’s dorm-room typewriter, with its only marginally professional look, to be qualified for a Selectric.
I was told that he locked the sugar (for the staff coffee machine) in the safe when he went home at the end of the day to make sure no one stole it or used more than their fair share.
On several occasions, impatient with this regime, I purchased some office supplies on my own and asked to be reimbursed. The sum total of my purchases over several occasions could not have come to more than $60 (in a school with a $3 or $4 million dollar budget. In variably, though, he was furious that I had purchased something without using the school’s tax i.d. so I could avoid the sales tax. He read me the riot act until I told him to go ahead and take the sales tax out of my salary—we were talking about less than $2.
He gradually had to give up his iron-fisted control with the arrival of a new administration that took us from the era of the ditto machine to actual copy machines like other organizations had had for decades. We knew the modern world had arrived when the Academic Studies Department was finally allocated a small desktop computer to use for word processing.
Eventually he retired, and I understand that he, his wife and friends drove their giant recreational vehicles around the country to places like Lake Powell, where they enjoyed the camping life. He had, honestly, been a good steward of the institution’s finances, and an okay guy when I wasn’t asking for money, so I was glad to hear that he was happy.
And, truth be told, he did influence me: even in our current, more environmentally-conscious times, institutions use reams and reams of paper, almost always only on one side, sometimes only for a couple of lines of information (even now, with inter- and intra- departmental e-mail). CCS was no different; it just went through trees at a lower rate than a big institution like Wayne State.
Asking myself, what would J.C. do, I decided that I would collect this barely-used paper and recycle it, making notes for class discussion and lecture, printing meeting agendas, etc., etc. One day, I told the dean I had such a collection, and it was increasing at an alarming rate—I couldn’t write notes, memos, agendas fast enough. He laughed and gave me the J.C. prize for the day. There was no medal, no plaque, no document (we had to save money, after all). In fact, there was nothing—it was a joke in passing. But I did get a special frisson at having deserved such merit. J.C., wherever he was, cruising highways and byways, probably smiled with satisfaction at his enduring legacy.
A boast by the CFO of Center for Creative Studies—I didn’t hear this directly. It was reported to me. But I could imagine him saying it, with his fist clenched, and a sense that he was saving the institution from financial collapse and disappearance into the abyss. His initials were J.C. (I’ll withhold his full name.) Interestingly, “J.C.” are also the initials of another not-so-very-unknown messianic figure.
CFO overstates his title—he was the school’s accountant. He handled all the financial transactions, and in that capacity he considered it his personal mission to be as tight-fisted as possible. “Scrooge” was a compliment. When I first arrived at CCS, in 1976, shortly after it had converted from a two-year certificate-granting institution to a bona-fide four-year degree-granting institution, he held sway. Outside the exercise of his professional responsibilities, he was a genuinely congenial and easy-going guy, but in his office, watch out! He had the cop’s “command and control” demeanour, and a bulldog’s stocky, solid build. He always wore a white or off-white dress shirt, no tie, sleeves rolled up to reveal muscular forearms—he might have anchored a bowling team in his off-hours. His wife, whom I met once, was unfailingly sweet and good-natured.
If I ran out of chalk in a classroom, I had to make a trip to his office (a building away) for more. On my first visit, I expected that he would give me at least a box of chalk—if not several—to keep in the department offices. This appeal must have happened before, though. He was prepared. He rummaged in his desk for a moment and produced two clean white sticks, admonishing me to use them sparingly. When I suggested that it was ridiculous for me to walk over to his office just for two sticks of chalk, I got the command and control glare.
The academic department had no typewriter. The secretarial staff in the main office had, I believe, just started converting from manuals to IBM Selectrics. I asked about getting a typewriter for our department and, several days later, was given a Smith-Corona portable electric typewriter purchased at K-Mart. We used that for several years. We may have gotten a second one later. It took a couple of years of typing out letters and memos on what was essentially a student’s dorm-room typewriter, with its only marginally professional look, to be qualified for a Selectric.
I was told that he locked the sugar (for the staff coffee machine) in the safe when he went home at the end of the day to make sure no one stole it or used more than their fair share.
On several occasions, impatient with this regime, I purchased some office supplies on my own and asked to be reimbursed. The sum total of my purchases over several occasions could not have come to more than $60 (in a school with a $3 or $4 million dollar budget. In variably, though, he was furious that I had purchased something without using the school’s tax i.d. so I could avoid the sales tax. He read me the riot act until I told him to go ahead and take the sales tax out of my salary—we were talking about less than $2.
He gradually had to give up his iron-fisted control with the arrival of a new administration that took us from the era of the ditto machine to actual copy machines like other organizations had had for decades. We knew the modern world had arrived when the Academic Studies Department was finally allocated a small desktop computer to use for word processing.
Eventually he retired, and I understand that he, his wife and friends drove their giant recreational vehicles around the country to places like Lake Powell, where they enjoyed the camping life. He had, honestly, been a good steward of the institution’s finances, and an okay guy when I wasn’t asking for money, so I was glad to hear that he was happy.
And, truth be told, he did influence me: even in our current, more environmentally-conscious times, institutions use reams and reams of paper, almost always only on one side, sometimes only for a couple of lines of information (even now, with inter- and intra- departmental e-mail). CCS was no different; it just went through trees at a lower rate than a big institution like Wayne State.
Asking myself, what would J.C. do, I decided that I would collect this barely-used paper and recycle it, making notes for class discussion and lecture, printing meeting agendas, etc., etc. One day, I told the dean I had such a collection, and it was increasing at an alarming rate—I couldn’t write notes, memos, agendas fast enough. He laughed and gave me the J.C. prize for the day. There was no medal, no plaque, no document (we had to save money, after all). In fact, there was nothing—it was a joke in passing. But I did get a special frisson at having deserved such merit. J.C., wherever he was, cruising highways and byways, probably smiled with satisfaction at his enduring legacy.
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